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Sulome

19 Dec, 8 tweets, 3 min read

@TheAtlantic

At some point, all reporters miss things they should have caught. This is one of mine. I wrote this @TheAtlantic story in 2014 about abuse at wilderness programs for troubled teens. I visited a program called Redcliff Ascent in Utah, here @TroubledKidHelp. theatlantic.com/health/archive…

The situation at Redcliff was not one I would have wanted to end up in as a teenager, but the landscape was stunningly beautiful, and I was being shown around by a very nice and sincere man, who truly seemed to mean well. His sincerity made me miss what I should not have.

I had heard horrific stories of abuse at other camps, but staff at Redcliff introduced me to kids who seemed healthy and, if not happy, at least not being tortured. I opened with an anecdote about a red-faced, heavy-set girl I never spoke with, who was crying to go home.

I felt I had been very fair to Redcliff, but they were unhappy with the piece. One person I interviewed, who worked for a company these programs hire to literally kidnap troubled teenagers out of their beds and toss them into the woods, wrote this about me safepassagetransport.com/articles/2019/…

On December 9, six years after I published my story, I received this email from a young woman—the red-faced girl I had written about. She told me she suffered horrific abuse at Redcliff.

This young woman, whose name I will not include out of respect for her privacy, told me she is still tormented by what happened at Redcliff, currently struggles with alcohol abuse, and suffers from severe PTSD, to the extent that she can’t sleep more than an hour or two a night.

I was absolutely gutted to read this. I failed in my job, which is to expose things like what happened to her. Unfortunately, her experience is par for the course, in an unregulated troubled teen industry rife with institutional problems and abuse. sltrib.com/news/2020/08/3…

I told this young lady nothing that happened was her fault. She was just a kid, and she deserved better from the adults around her, including myself. I’m sharing her story, so places like RedCliff Ascent will know that experiences like hers are forever—and now this will be too.

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More from @SulomeAnderson

Sulome

@SulomeAnderson

21 Nov

Glenn Greenwald has the nicest fans

https://twitter.com/SulomeAnderson/status/1328763499657502721?s=20

This is a thread about how dangerous idiots can be. I will be attaching screenshots of all the tweets I just received in response to the below tweet. There are hundreds of them, most calling me a spy. Please allow me to explain why this is a problem.

https://twitter.com/SulomeAnderson/status/1328763499657502721?s=20

I am morally opposed to journalists working as intelligence agents. Why? Because after my father, a journalist, was kidnapped by terrorists, they tortured him again and again for years, calling him CIA. "I am not a spy!" he would scream. "I am a reporter!" It never stopped them.

Read 9 tweets

Sulome

@SulomeAnderson

7 Nov

My mom likes to tell the story of how, as a toddler born in the U.S. who left a week later, I grew up overseas and knew very few Americans; but even when I could barely speak, I would become very upset when people said I was Cypriot.

“NO,” I would yell at them. “I AM AMEWICAN.”

I was always quite a moral child, and I somehow knew we were supposed to be a place where people didn’t hurt each other for no reason, like they did in wars, which was most of what I had been exposed to at that point. Bad men didn’t take fathers there, like mine had been taken.

My dad was kidnapped for being American in a place where that made you valuable, for the wrong reasons. My mother still brought me in and out of Lebanon during the war. “Don’t tell anyone you’re American,” she would hiss at me there. “Don’t speak any English at all. Only Arabic.”

Read 6 tweets

Sulome

@SulomeAnderson

19 Sep

Good morning to the journalists and pundits who spent three and a half years pooh-poohing any suggestion we might be heading down a road to authoritarianism and doing backflips to contort everything that led us here into some semblance of normality

The ultimate tragedy of what’s happening isn’t that it came out of nowhere. It’s that it was so blatantly obvious every step of the way, and could perhaps have been prevented, had every headline from mid-2015 onwards fulfilled the basic role of journalism to warn the public.

“What did you do as your democracy crumbled in front of the world, Daddy/Mommy?”

“I RePoRtEd BoTh SiDeZ EqUaLlY, JoHnNy.”

Read 5 tweets

Sulome

@SulomeAnderson

18 Jun

A cop hit on me when I was 21 and drunk in front of a club. I told him to go f**k himself. He slammed me against a wall and when I resisted, wrestled me to the ground and arrested me. I was taken to the precinct and cuffed to a pipe in front of a drunk tank of men for 18 hours.

I spent the weekend in custody, miserably hungover and sobbing, still wearing a miniskirt and high heels. When I was booked that Monday, I found out the cops wrote in their report that they arrested me because I walked up to them and said I had crystal meth on me.

To be clear, I have never done meth, and if I had been, I certainly wouldn’t have volunteered that information to the police. I had no drugs on me when I was searched. They originally charged me with resisting arrest and assaulting a police officer, both felonies with jail time.

Read 10 tweets

Sulome

@SulomeAnderson

11 May

Kind of hard to take someone seriously about opening up the country during a pandemic that’s supposedly been defeated when nobody is allowed near him without a temperature check and a test for the virus

If the President of the United States can’t walk into the same room with someone who hasn’t been screened for COVID-19, how are Americans supposed to feel safe going about their daily lives with no readily available tests and no expert personal medical staff on immediate call?

I’m not an economist, but wouldn’t it have made more sense to just take the financial hit in the short run, keep lockdown going, contain the pandemic to an acceptable degree and then open up the country—maybe even in plenty of time for Election Day, if that’s the concern?

Read 5 tweets

Sulome

@SulomeAnderson

23 Apr

I just got this. To clarify, I was born in NY. My mother is Lebanese and my father is a Marine veteran who did 2 tours in Vietnam and was kidnapped by terrorists for the first 7 years of my life for being American. The coward who didn’t sign his name needs to learn how to Google.

P.S. I found this guy by searching his email address and he's such an obvious goober that it wouldn't even be worth the effort to dox him. It did make me feel better to put a face to that racist email, though. Great reminder that most of these guys are more pathetic than scary.

Read 4 tweets

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